Age of Sigmar, week 6 – and more!

Hey everybody!
The releases just keep coming for Age of Sigmar! Fortunately, we’ve moved into the realms of Chaos now, and while it’s nothing against the models themselves, I’m perfectly fine to sit these out. That said, there is a new book out today!

The Quest for Ghal Maraz is a lovely book, let me tell you! As you may know, Ghal Maraz is the name of Sigmar’s warhammer – the weapon that gave its name to the entire game line – was lost during the end of the world-that-was, so the Stormcast Eternals are dispatched to find it once more. I’ve flicked through the tome, and I’ve got to say, it’s really impressive. So many people write off these big hardcover books for being of little value to the game, but the fact of the matter is, these books are beautiful. The artwork is awesome, and the dioramas of miniatures are truly spectacular. The content is also pretty great, meaning the sum is well worth it. Of course, everybody is different, but I’m a fan, and will no doubt keep buying these things as long as Games Workshop keep pumping them out!

This might sound a bit weird, but the book actually feels like one of those Annuals types of books you might have had as a kid, with some sort of overarching story, some fact-file type things with character profiles and whatnot, and some things for you to do – in this case, the battle plans and painting guides. It’s actually a lot of fun when you look at it, anyway! The book ends with a series of warscrolls for you to use in your battles. The majority of these warscrolls are basically those we’ve already seen – the Stormcast Eternals and the Chaos guys from the last book are reproduced in their entirety, alongside which we have those for the new Paladins, and the new Chaos lord that’s up for preorder this week, who you can see on the cover of this week’s White Dwarf.

Indeed, the theme for this week’s Dwarf is very much Chaos, particularly Chaos re-boxings. Continuing last week’s Skaven re-boxings (which are available today, of course), we’re now getting more Nurgle-centric releases, including the fabulously-disgusting Glottkin model from the End Times. Beautiful! All of these re-packaged models have warscrolls in the book, of course, but will henceforth come with them in their box, also. Chaos – and, specifically, Nurgle – is strong in this issue, with an extensive look at the Khorne army that has grown considerably since the Age of Sigmar starter set, and an article exploring the Nurgle/Skaven alliance. This is something that feels completely natural, to the extent that now we see it, I wonder why it hasn’t happened sooner.

So I’m still a little concerned by the fact we’ve not had the Prosecutors box yet, in fact I’m starting to wonder if we’ll even be getting one. Hopefully, of course, we’ll get the winged beauties as part of a second wave of Stormcast Eternals that includes even more wonderful models – time will tell!

Anyway!

What else I’ve been up to this week

As a sort of celebration of a year of painting miniatures, I’ve been slowly working on some Sylvaneth Dryads that were picked up last week. Beautiful models, let me get that out there right now. I was worried they’d be horrendous to put together, but they’re actually pretty straightforward. I’m following the Winter scheme that was put out in the How to Paint Citadel Miniatures ebook, helped immeasurably by the very wonderful Roemer’s Workshop, and I have to say, I’m really impressed with the results!

I’ve actually cheated somewhat here, and drybrushed the highlights rather than layering them, but the effect, I feel, is just as good. I also haven’t gone for the glow effect with the eyes, but I think they look just fine without it. I’m particularly pleased with the frozen-ground effect, as I was worried it wouldn’t look that good, but has turned out pretty much exactly as I’d hoped! So I’m going to get some more of these guys built up soon, though I’m currently involved in getting my Stormcast Eternals finished from the starter box. It is six weeks since this thing came out, after all…!

I’ve been reading The Curse of Khaine, the third novel in the End Times series that came out in November last year. Of course, I’ve read the first two – Nagash and Fall of Altdorf – and thoroughly enjoyed them both, but stalled over Christmas and hadn’t read a Warhammer novel since. It’s really nice to get back into that world, however, even though I now know how the End Times end!

The story is pretty decent, nowhere near as good as Fall of Altforf, which remains one of my favourite fantasy novels of all time. It’s pretty much a character-study of the dark elf Malekith as he pursues his quest to become the Phoenix King, seen as his birthright since his father, Aenarion, held the title. Malekith is now a very old guy – I think 6000 years old is given as his age, though I could be mistaken – and as such, he has periods where he lapses into memories of the past. This is an interesting aside to the pacing of the novel at first, but does get a little annoying as time goes on. Purely a personal thing, but still – pages-long reminiscences can be interesting to build character, but they keep coming throughout the whole book, and it did feel like it threw things off.

The novel accompanied the fluff/crunch release of Khaine, a model that the new Age of Sigmar campaign books seem to be streamlining. Breathtaking collections of Citadel miniatures sit alongside fantastic artwork to tell the story of the battles on Ulthuan as Malekith attempts to re-take his birthright. The hardback fluff book is akin to a historical non-fiction book, and tells the full story of the war – as such, it’s almost the perfect companion piece to the novel.